SteveW wrote:Interestingly they said 1 Korean coach met the criteria but they decided not to take his name forward...were they seriously considering bringing back a former coach like Huh Jung Moo I wonder?

Most seem to think it was either Choi Yong-Soo or Hwang Sun-Hong. I don't think Huh Jung-Moo was really considered given he just quit his VP position at the KFA.

SteveW wrote:Interestingly they said 1 Korean coach met the criteria but they decided not to take his name forward...were they seriously considering bringing back a former coach like Huh Jung Moo I wonder?

Most seem to think it was either Choi Yong-Soo or Hwang Sun-Hong. I don't think Huh Jung-Moo was really considered given he just quit his VP position at the KFA.

SteveW wrote:Interestingly they said 1 Korean coach met the criteria but they decided not to take his name forward...were they seriously considering bringing back a former coach like Huh Jung Moo I wonder?

Most seem to think it was either Choi Yong-Soo or Hwang Sun-Hong. I don't think Huh Jung-Moo was really considered given he just quit his VP position at the KFA.

They don't meet the criteria though do they?

Think the competition criteria was an 'or' thing, so by virtue of making the knockout stages of AFC CL, they meet it.

The criteria was more geared towards international experience, so going through the group stages in the ACL wouldn't count as neither Choi nor Hwang have managed a national team. As SteveW says, the domestic candidate that Lee Yong-soo said ticks all the boxes can only really be Huh Jung-moo (managed Korea at the Asian Cup in 2000 and finished third, involved in the qualifiers for the 2010 World Cup and took Korea to the last sixteen there) but they're not going to consider him.

The next coach to lead the Taegeuk Warriors will be a foreigner, the first to lead the national football team since 2007 when Pim Verbeek of the Netherlands resigned from the post.

Lee Yong-soo, chief of the Korea Football Association’s (KFA) technical committee, said in a press briefing held yesterday at the National Football Center in Paju, northern Gyeonggi, that after discussing with the committee who the KFA should hire, they cut the list from 47 to three, though they did not reveal the names. Lee added that KFA officials will start arranging meetings with those candidates next week to begin negotiating.

Lee said that the committee reviewed whether the candidates met eight conditions they deemed essential for the leader of the national team, which are: experience leading a team in a Cup event such as the Asian Cup; whether the candidate had gone through regional preliminary rounds for the World Cup; whether the candidate had made it into the Round of 16 in the World Cup; if the manager had led a club team in his career; whether he has good communications skills to work with the KFA, team staff and players; whether the candidate can also run programs organized by the KFA to improve football such as teaching young coaches; and must be younger than 66 and fluent in English.

The following are excerpts from the press conference with the committee chief.

Q. Please explain how you decided on the final three candidates.

A. A total of seven committee members participated in the meeting and three said the new coach should be a Korean and the other three said we should hire a foreign coach. In order to get a clear idea, we discussed what the new coach must be capable of regardless of nationality. Preparing for January’s Asian Cup was the first goal, the Asian regional preliminary rounds for the 2018 World Cup was the second, and the World Cup after the preliminary rounds was the last to be considered.

Considering all those conditions, we concluded that we need someone who had made the Round of 16 in the Cup and someone who is younger than 66 right now because we thought the World Cup would be tough work for someone turning 70 four years from now. A total of 47 candidates - 17 Koreans and 30 foreigners - were reviewed and were narrowed down to three.

So Korean coaches are off the table for sure?

There was one Korean coach who fulfilled all conditions, but we decided not to work with him at this time.

Korea is scheduled to play two friendly matches in September. Do you think we can bring the new coach before that time?

There are two scenarios for that but considering that the new coach will not have enough time to study even if we hire him before September, one option is to set up a group of Korean coaches who will support the new coach prior to hiring him and then let them manage the matches. The other scenario is to ask a Korean coach to lead the matches temporarily.

Did the committee discuss the candidates’ salary?

We haven’t. I think the KFA might have to pay a bigger sum of money than they thought, but all the negotiation work is on the KFA. Under the circumstances, the negotiations might take longer than we think.

Based on the conditions set by the technical committee, the Korea JoongAng Daily found several candidates for coach: Bert van Marwijk (Netherlands); Raymond Domenech (France); Glenn Hoddle (England); Sven-Goran Eriksson (Sweden); Jorge Luis Pinto (Colombia); and Alejandro Sabella (Argentina), but it is likely that Eriksson, who received about 10 billion won ($9.74 million) from England, is too expensive and the coaches from South America don’t speak English.

The assumed salary for the new coach is predicted to be between 1 billion won to 1.5 billion won.

One who doesn't concentrate too much on fitness. Fitness training is for club managers and players are tired enough flying across the world midweek to a different climate. You don't train a national team, you guide them tactically.

One who fits the tactics to the players rather than the players to the tactics. Pick the best players eligible and then build a system around them. Let the youth teams play a style that suits them. This is the opposite to club football where you can trade for the players you need.

Korea, with the current crop of players, need a system that builds on the whole team rather than relying on a few attacking magicians. Full-backs need to get forward for crosses, central defenders need to go up for set pieces and score. Midfielders need to work their socks off to get the ball back, but still have attacking roles.

One who instantly commands respect and can work with inflated player egos and the media circus. It's hard to build up a team spirit with the disjointed nature of international football, although that becomes increasingly important at the big tournaments. It's even harder for softly spoken, quieter managers with little playing experience at the highest level.

I would put Korean ability and knowledge of the Korean set-up (and its internal politics) very highly. It will be interesting to see how an outsider does and maybe having training in English will get the players sufficiently out of their comfort zones to be beneficial.

Van Marwijk isn't big on fitness (Hamburg were not very fit) but he's quite soft on a lot of things, doesn't speak Korean and has never coached (lived?) outside of Europe. Tactically I don't think he had any answers to Spain in the 2010 final except foul them often. Both the Netherlands of 2010 and Hamburg last year had systems with well defined attackers and defenders, that relied a lot on individual creativity to get goals.

The Korea Football Association (KFA) is making progress overseas toward hiring a new coach for the national team. According to multiple sources, high-ranking officials of the KFA including technical committee chief Lee Yong-soo; KFA Vice President Kim Dong-dae; and International Affairs Department chief Jeon Han-jin went to the Netherlands on Tuesday.

The sources said the proceedings were conducted in profound secrecy and that other KFA officials didn’t know about their departure. According to some officials, Jeon told his colleagues that he was going on vacation.

But rather than go on vacation, they headed to Amsterdam to meet Bert van Marwijk, one of three candidates the KFA is considering to lead the Taegeuk Warriors. Yesterday, multiple Dutch media outlets said the 61-year-old coach began negotiating with the Koreans after he couldn’t reach a deal with a club team. At the end of last month, technical committee chief Lee announced that the KFA had selected three candidates who met their conditions for a leader of the national team. Van Marwijk was on the shortlist along with Fernando Santos of Portugal and Jose Antonio Camacho of Spain.

Van Marwijk led the Netherlands to a second-place finish in the 2010 South Africa World Cup while Santos led Greece to the Round of 16 in Brazil this year and Camacho led Spain to the quarterfinals in the 2002 Korea-Japan World Cup.

According to a former KFA official who took part in negotiations with former foreign national team coaches, the talks generally are held in person.

“All they do before they meet a candidate is set up the meeting,” the former official said on the condition of anonymity. “We never ask whether he is willing to take the team on the phone or by email. Everything gets started after they see each other. Both of them definitely need some time to listen to each other’s opinions about the job and related matters including the salary of the coach.”

But the meeting with van Marwijk doesn’t guarantee that Korea will have a new coach soon because of the variables that could impact the contract.

“Negotiating the coach’s salary and the duration of a contract isn’t everything,” the former KFA official said. “We once reached a deal with a foreign coach years ago and we thought everything was finally done because the coach’s salary, which is considered the hardest part of negotiations, was solved. But hours later, he informed us that he couldn’t take the job, saying his family didn’t want him to work in Asia.”

He added, “It doesn’t mean that the KFA will have an announcement to make within days just because they are in the Netherlands. If the negotiation doesn’t work out well, they will head to another country that they probably have planned.”

SEOUL, Aug. 7 (Yonhap) -- Bert van Marwijk, a former Dutch national head coach, has shown an interest in managing the South Korean men's senior football team, the sport's local technical director said Thursday.

"Though we have no results to report at the moment, we did confirm van Marwijk's interest in becoming the next head coach of our men's senior football team," Lee Yong-soo, the head of the technical committee at the Korea Football Association (KFA), said at a press conference in Seoul.

Earlier this week, Lee, who was named the new head of the technical committee in late July, flew into Amsterdam to hold talks with van Marwijk on the top coaching job in South Korean football.

"We will wait a little longer for him to make a final decision. The negotiation will be finalized in about a week," Lee said, adding that the KFA has not contacted two other foreign candidates on its shortlist.

"At the moment, van Marwijk's decision is the most important factor in making this deal successful," Lee said. "Should he decide to take up the post, I am sure we will be able to work out the details."

The position on the senior national team has been vacant since last month when Hong Myung-bo resigned to take responsibility for South Korea's winless exit out of the FIFA World Cup in Brazil.

Last month, the KFA said it had narrowed down its candidates to three foreign national coaches. Van Marwijk is the No. 1 choice, though the association has refused to tell who the other two are.

The KFA said it will move on to its second and third choices only if the deal with van Marwijk falls through.

The 62-year-old Dutchman coached the Netherlands from 2008 to 2012, steering his native country to the final at the 2010 World Cup. He managed the Netherlands in 52 matches, recording 34 wins, 10 draws and eight losses, but stepped down after a disappointing Euro 2012.

He has also led top-notch clubs such as Feyenoord in the Netherlands and Borussia Dortmund and Hamburger SV in Germany.

Though Feyenoord under van Marwijk came out victorious in the 2007-2008 Dutch Cup, the Dutchman yielded mixed results during his term at Dortmund.

Most recently in February, he was sacked by Hamburger SV after logging seven consecutive losses in the Bundesliga, the top German league.

Despite his career setbacks, however, van Marwijk has experience leading a country past the round of 16 at the World Cup, a key criteria for the South Korean coaching position, according to the KFA.

He is also proficient in English to be able to coach his players in the language, and can sign with South Korea immediately, both of which are considered attractive to the KFA.

Should he take over South Korea, van Marwijk will be the fourth Dutch coach here since Guus Hiddink, who guided South Korea to the semifinals of the 2002 World Cup.

Lee said earlier a new head coach will manage South Korea in a friendly match against Venezuela on Sept. 5 and against Uruguay three days later in preparation for January's Asian Cup in Australia, the next major international competition.

He will also lead South Korea through the Asian qualifications for the 2018 World Cup in Russia, with the final regional qualification round scheduled to wrap up in 2017.